This week I’m attending ASU’s 3rd Annual
Conference on Governance of Emerging Technologies: Law, Policy, and Ethics (here). The
conference is extraordinarily interesting. The plenary session addressed
Technological Unemployment.
I found presentations by Martin Ford and James Hughes to be
particularly interesting.
You can read about Ford’s “Rise of the Machines” and the jobless
future here: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/rise-machines-future-lots-robots-jobs-humans/
James Hughes’ warning that technology must be implemented
democratically is found in, Citizen
Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the
Future, http://www.amazon.com/Citizen-Cyborg-Democratic-Societies-Redesigned/dp/0813341981
They both argue that automation has created unprecedented
productivity expansions that have gone disproportionately to owners and top
managers of large companies. Theirs is not a new argument, but they each developed it
well with strong evidence. Google, for example has a small fraction of Ford’s
workforce (5 percent) , but reaps even greater profitability.
Each speaker explored policy responses to long-term unemployment trends, ranging from a minimum guaranteed
income to early retirement. I like the idea of early retirement! Young people
are being shut out of upwardly mobile jobs as older people fail to retire
because of economic insecurity. There were many other policy options I wont review here but can be found in their published work.
Neither thinker rejected technological innovation. Rather,
they argued that decision making about the types of technologies developed and
implemented should include social impacts.
Neither thinker addressed the role of environmental resource
limits in curtailing the potential for future automation. Automation is only
efficient if the energy to produce the machines and operate them is
inexpensive.
I always enjoyed the technological utopia presented with the Jetsons cartoon when I was a kid but I took the red pill and know the difference between false utopias and authentic dystopias.
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